The Curious Plight of the Modern Debutante

On the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend last year, several dozen sleek young women moved along a receiving line of pleasant young men upstairs at P.J. Clarke’s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. They were inspecting their escort options for the 62nd Anniversary International Debutante Ball.

Smiles flashed and cheeks flushed as small talk sputtered into conversation. The boys, as they’re called, well groomed and in blazers, had been recommended by parents or friends of former debutantes. Parents and grandparents loitered in a corner, corralled by the organizers to keep them from making a delicate social situation worse. It was as awkward as a Sadie Hawkins dance.

“My grandmother made me come and told me to wear this,” said one young woman in a bright pink sheath. “And I look like a cupcake.”

As the event lurched along, Margaret Stewart Hedberg, who has been running the ball since 1983, made an announcement. “If you young ladies don’t find your own escorts, then I’m going to have to do it at home with a dartboard, and you don’t want that,” she trilled with a good-natured smile. “So please don’t be shy. Just ask a boy. Remember, it’s a date, not a mate!”

It’s a dying tradition, so I may as well enjoy it before it’s gone.

Diana Castellano, a willowy niece of Oleg Cassini, and her twin sister Connor sat with an untouched salad and texted friends in Florida, where she goes to school.

“I really don’t even know what I’m doing here,” she muttered. That’s understandable at a time when polite young women search for suitable mates on Tinder and Bumble, and even the more conservative ones participate in women’s marches and rallies for reproductive rights.

And if they’re looking to make a name for themselves in society, there are Instagram accounts for that, offering the opportunity of documenting attendance at invitation-only fashion shows, Hamptons parties, and red carpet premieres.

Some debutantes, many of whom take dancing and etiquette classes to prepare, get asked by clueless friends if they’re beauty pageant contestants. Others have to explain that cotillions are not the kind of grueling social warfare portrayed on Gossip Girl. Kittsie Ann Klaes, who came out in both her native Texas and in England last year, shocked some of her University of St. Andrews classmates when she flew them over from Scotland for her coming out at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston, where the deb scene thrives. “They asked if my parents were offering me up with a dowry along with some land,” she says.

My friends asked if my parents were offering me up with a dowry along with some land.

These days the party line on debutante balls, which occur all over the country, often as a way of asserting the increasingly outdated idea of lineage, is that they’re more about networking than marriage. Rather than a mate, women who participate may be looking for entrance into a social scene or for a leg up in business.

When the New York Timescovered go-getter debutante Hadley Nagel in 2010, it made her sound like a cross between Hillary Clinton and Arianna Huffington—never mind that two of Nagel’s ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence. In advance of this year’s International Debutante Ball, Charlotte Young Santomero, of Bedford, New York, who flies a plane and is the finance director of UCLA’s Republican Club, was in Washington helping Elaine Chao prepare for her congressional hearing after Chao was nominated to be secretary of transportation.

Michael Stillwell

“As a debutante I get to meet people from all over the world,” Santomero says, with the rigid diplomacy of the country club class. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” And finding a mate, one can reasonably assume, has nothing to do with it.

But even so, in a culture defined by The Beauty Myth, later-wave feminism, and LGBT awareness, the idea of women dressing up in virginal white to put themselves on display in such a conventional context sets teeth clenching and fingers wagging. It doesn’t help when Hedberg says that while she’s all for women’s lib, “my mother always said, ‘A woman is like a diamond—she needs a nice setting!’”

Try posting anything upbeat about debutantes on social media and you’re likely to get heavy cynical commentary about fetishism, feminism, classism, and racism. In British newspapers, coverage of debutantes has more than once rankled readers, who are inspired to write snarky comments about ostentation and privilege.

“The whole debutante thing seems overtly and intentionally outdated,” says Wednesday Martin. The Primates of Park Avenueauthor is writing a book about female sexuality, and she bristles at the thought of young women lined up in white dresses, even if they claim not to be looking for husbands. “You have them dressed up in the color symbolizing virginity. It seems like human trafficking to me,” Martin says.

“It’s tragic that it still goes on, because these days you have young women who, even though they might be outpacing men in education and early career salaries, know they still need a fallback once they become mothers, and that fallback is a rich husband. That’s really what it’s about.”

Queen Elizabeth I began the tradition of inviting women of noble birth to be presented to the royal court, and in the 18th century the fundraising balls hosted by King George III and Queen Charlotte strengthened the tradition of the high-born “coming out” to present themselves as suitable wives. In the 19th and 20th centuries, eligible American women would spend months attending balls both here and abroad, which sometimes resulted in new money propping up old English aristocracy.

In Britain the debutante tradition came to an unceremonious halt in 1958. Public criticism of the ritual, along with sinking standards (Princess Margaret said that “every tart in London was getting in”), led Queen Elizabeth II to stop it. In recent years, however, it has been revived outside the royal court in the form of Queen Charlotte’s Ball, which gathers women (carefully screened) from around the world at British venues such as Kensington Palace.

A deb takes a Texas Dip, Dallas, 2014.

Laura Buckman

The United States has its own tradition of debutante balls, starting with the Cotillion of the founding fathers in Philadelphia. A culture of coming out took hold from there, especially in the South, where it enforced dying traditions and upheld the prominence of a waning ruling class. By the 1920s and into the Depression, the media was paying close attention to debutantes.

And for strategic strivers who had joined (or hoped to join) the boards of country clubs and charitable organizations, there was no better way to play the social-climbing game than by presenting a debutante daughter. “The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger,” Paul Fussell wrote in Class, his 1983 book about social stratification.

It wasn’t until the late 1960s that debutante culture started to get the opprobrium and ridicule for its perceived antifeminism and elitism it still faces. “I’m always on defense at dinner parties,” says Hedberg, who inherited the International Debutante Ball from an aunt who had started it in 1954 as an alternative to more insular Old New York balls. “People think deb balls are antifeminist and a waste of money, and I understand. These days, coming out is a thing that only certain young people want to do.”

And if not the young people, then their parents and grandparents. Anne Eisenhower’s feisty granddaughter, Camila Mendoza Echavarria, was a debutante representing the United States at the recent 2016 International Debutante Ball. When she announced this to her Sarah Lawrence roommates they looked at her as if she had lost her mind.

You have to wonder if many of these kids even have dresses, or jackets and ties—it’s just such a different world these days.

“To some people it seems outdated, but I think it’s festive and wonderful,” says Eisenhower, one of a gaggle of Eisenhower, Nixon, and Forbes family members who have attended the ball, along with daughters of foreign nobles, ambassadors, and statesmen. “I mean, you have to wonder if many of these kids even have dresses, or jackets and ties—it’s just such a different world these days.”

Indeed it is. Although, in her own way, Brenda Frazier, the most famous American debutante (she made the cover of Life for her 1938 coming out), was the Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton of her time. Her memoir, My Debut—A Horror, was published in 1963. “How sad,” Cornelia Guest told People in 1982, when she came out with a degree of glitz that was eschewed by old society but was trending in the opulent 1980s. “The whole point of being a deb is to have fun.”

Whit Stillman would agree. The director’s 1990 film Metropolitan chronicles a clique of privileged New York youngsters attending and critiquing one dance after another. In the 1970s, when Stillman was a socialist-leaning Harvard student without much money, the mother of a friend asked him and his best friend to serve as a dual escort for her daughter. At that time the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s in New York were called “Dance Season,” as young women and their escorts went from one ball to the next as if it were Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

“It wasn’t as if any of the people I knew were clamoring to go,” Stillman says. “It was very elective but it was fun, and it makes me happy to see it still exists today.”

First among the attention-getters today is Le Bal des Débutantes, in Paris. Many think this event, originally held at the Crillon Hotel and now at the Peninsula, is the epitome of Old World glamour, but it was actually started by a savvy PR woman, Ophélie Renouard, in 1992 to promote Paris couturiers who wanted media exposure.

Renouard put designer gowns on sample-size European aristocrats and their American showbiz equivalents. In recent years they have included a Stallone, a David (as in Larry), an Eastwood, and a Willis. “When they throw balls, this is the one you come to,” Bruce Willis barks in a video on Le Bal’s celebrity-choked website.

In October, Le Bal announced that 18-year-old Ava Phillippe, daughter of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe, would attend as part of an American contingent that will also include Lori Harvey, stepdaughter of Steve Harvey, and Laila Blavatnik, daughter of the New York–and London-based mogul Len Blavatnik. (Phillippe, Harvey, and Blavatnik made their debuts on November 25th.)

Stateside there are less mediacentric options, although most require some kind of interview or nomination from a committee member. Dallas has, among many other events, the Idlewild Club’s debutante ball, in its 130th year—it was started to allow old families to mix with recent wealth. St. Louis has its quirky Veiled Prophet Ball, hosted by a secret society.

Then there’s New Orleans, where coming out season runs from June until Mardi Gras (some debutantes have taken an entire semester off from college to participate), and every young woman—from every ethnic and racial background—is announced in the Times-Picayune. For decades coming out there was part of a genteel tradition enforced by a strict hierarchy of social organizations such as Twelfth Night, Comus, Momus, and Atlanteans, which presented young women of established families, all of whom knew one another. Black families had their tradition-bound cotillions as well. Events featured courts of “maids” and “princesses” and the creation of live tableaux.

Rather than fade away, as so many traditions do, New Orleans’s deb scene has escalated in recent decades. “It has changed drastically, so that now anybody can come out,” says one 1967 debutante who misses the discretion of earlier times. “And many of the most over-the-top parties are given by arrivistes.”

These private parties, which happen between summer and carnival season (various krewes and social clubs present the women separately during Mardi Gras), can cost well over $100,000. Top New York party designer Bronson van Wyck once took the architectural plan for the original royal hunting lodge at Versailles and recreated it with an orangerie and a hall of mirrors. “People in New Orleans compare debutante parties to an arms race,” says van Wyck, who grew up in Arkansas. “But I think Southerners are particularly unapologetic about their regional eccentricities.”

In New York, meanwhile, where the traditions are less hallucinogenic, a subtle hierarchy of exclusivity survives. Young women with the proper lineage can be invited to come out at the Mayflower Ball, often only a few in a season.

Those who don’t want to be as formally presented attend the Junior Assembly, which resembles a country club dance and has similar invitation-only sister events around the country. The Junior League rejects the terms cotillion and debutante, but it has a winter dance for daughters of members. The Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball (known as the Infirmary Ball because it raises money for New York Downtown Hospital) draws from Greenwich, Tuxedo Park, and select New Jersey suburbs, as well as New York City.

It makes debutantes perform archaic dances while carrying candles and singing Christmas songs. “I did talk the old dowagers in charge into cutting out some of that silly stuff,” says Jamee Gregory, whose daughter Samantha was a reluctant debutante in the 1990s (she preferred participating in sports at Brown to worrying about a dress and a grand party). “I was delighted she agreed to come out, because I couldn’t in Chicago in the ’60s when everyone was protesting.”

Of all the coming-out parties in New York, the International Debutante Ball, which at one time was covered on local television, has a reputation for being the most democratic and media-friendly—and, as the characters in Metropolitan snipe, a little on the tacky side.

At last December’s ball, Wendy Yu, representing China, appeared in a vast cocoon of a Giambattista Valli tulle dress; she had a publicist and an assistant on hand, a power move that barely ruffled old-school attendees, who have gotten used to so many new forms of display. “Ladies, if anything goes wrong,” one starched committee minder in a sash told them as they waited to receive the first guest, “just smile through it, because it’s all part of the show.”

Ladies, if anything goes wrong, just smile through it, because it’s all part of the show.

Things have, in fact, gone wrong at past International Balls, including no-shows due to weather or injuries and the occasional drinking issue, although that happened more in the past and was rectified by having bartenders water down the cocktails. Parents, who pay $22,000 for the experience (it includes a table for 12 plus several warmup parties before the big night, but really it’s just the beginning of a whopping bill after couture, travel, hair, and makeup are factored in), don’t always love the seating, and committee members may take issue with the food or decor. And the receiving line itself has, in the past, taken several painful hours, pushing dinner and the presentations into the wee hours.

This year the receiving line moved right along. Camila Mendoza Echavarria, an aspiring journalist who represented the U.S., led the presentation. “Austin Scarlett from Project Runway!” she crowed when asked about her architecturally complex white gown. She seemed to straddle the line between sincerity and irony as she made small talk like an animatronic doll with one guest after the last. Her grandmother Anne Eisenhower, in a black Mary McFadden column dress, sounded equally robotic.

The forced civility in the air seemed far removed from daily life, especially in that brash post-election moment, although one could hear there was plenty of support for the president-elect on the receiving line. (“I’m from Canada and I came in legally,” said one dowager.) But never mind that, or the fact that young Echavarria would soon be publishing an opinion piece excoriating Trump in USA Today. It was time for cocktails, then dinner with the Lester Lanin Orchestra. For the first time in the ball’s history, giant TV monitors offered close-up coverage.

“I don’t like screens, but people seem to want them these days,” says Hedberg, whose headquarters is a closet in her Upper East Side home and who spends months tracking down escorts, vetting debutantes, and overseeing invitations, seating, and more. If the ball costs half a million dollars to put on, her take is a pittance after donations to various charities are subtracted. “My husband says I’m a good tax deduction, that’s all,” she says with a laugh.

For someone running such a polished and tradition-bound event, Hedberg can be pretty relaxed, so much so that she once told the New York Post that debutante balls survive because “people love the tradition—like a hot dog–eating contest!” At last year’s ball she was in black bedroom slippers so she could get around quickly to do any troubleshooting. Things were going well, although one sick guest had to be whisked off in an ambulance. Around midnight the debutantes were herded like white sheep into a room where they sat in rows on gilded chairs with their escorts. They would soon be presented, and although it required no more than a walk and a curtsy, they were anxious.

“If you’d like to give us your cell phones, now’s the time,” a sash man called out. After a fanfare and a color guard display that quickly crossed the line from pageantry to nonsense, the debutantes waited and fidgeted in a darkened doorway outside the ballroom, with their escorts at their sides and ball committee fussbudgets buzzing around them. Their names were announced one by one by a man with a TV announcer voice.

And then, to the strains of “New York, New York,” “I Love Paris,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and various other tunes made imposing by the big orchestra, they walked—illuminated by a follow spot—through the ballroom, onto the stage (holding their trains with one hand and their escorts’ hands with the other), and then turned and curtsied deeply to 1,000 or so applauding guests.

Dina Litovsky

“I still don’t know what I’m doing here,” said Diana Castellano, the Oleg Cassini niece, who waited for her turn. “But it’s a dying tradition, so I may as well enjoy it before it’s gone.” Another debutante asserted that she would need a drink after her curtsy and that one of her favorite parts of the whole experience was that the cocktails were free.

Later, while others danced, Kittsie Ann Klaes of Houston watched with her parents at their table. Her father runs a family-owned holding company descended from a grandfather’s car dealership fortune that had expanded into oil, real estate, and at one point the ownership of the Houston Rockets. Her mother comes from more modest means.

“As a Texan, I always wanted to be a debutante when I was growing up, but my family could never afford it,” she said. “So this is like a dream for me.” If her daughter, an aspiring director who interned at the Cannes Film Festival and showed a short film there, saw anything wrong with the deb tradition, she wasn’t showing it.

And soon it was time to call it a night, but not before a frenzied scramble for some items that had gone missing, including the jeweled bag of the grandmother of one debutante and the earring of a great-grandmother of another named Mamie. Anne Eisenhower didn’t look pleased. “It’ll turn up,” someone told her. Eventually it did.

This story appears in the December 2017/January 2018 issue of Town & Country. Subscribe Today

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